Against the Day...page 148
Sunday, November 26, 2006
I'm just past the first part of Against the Day. I've set aside most of my other reading (though I can't set aside my recent habit of reading John Clare at 3am, before bed) to tackle this thousand-plus page baby hippopotamus. I'm an appreciative, but not a great, reader of Pynchon. At his worst he's sort of weaponized Richard Farina, a well-off senescent hippie who steps out of his hilltop retreat every so often to blow our minds. At his best, as with Mason and Dixon, he has burned with the expansiveness that fuels any American literature worth reading, and has attached it to the (again, specifically American) political meaning of that word. As in, the spirit that makes us big and worth knowing is the one that makes others small. This is what makes him important, I guess: these two conflicting notions of expansiveness (bullying generosity, paranoid trust of all) are what many ambitious writers have been trying, and failing, to reconcile, and here he's mastered it in his goofball-hippie-but-with-knowledge-of-ballistics sort of way. It's just that I can take or leave important literature. There is nothing important that shouldn't make a right-thinking person want to yawn.
Against the Day attracts me in a different way: it is an exuberantly-written science fiction novel, a genre that definitely needs more exuberance and less doom and citation. Yet more specifically, it is a turn-of-the-(last)-century science fiction novel, my favorite. It's as if an author of the stature of H.G. Wells had picked up his pen again. (Pynchon is our Wells, incidentally: he's an irresponsible writer you find yourself referencing more often than writers of a more responsible, canonical status.) And more specifically still, the book is about one-quarter Edisonade, a genre I have been struggling and failing to write for years now. So my interest is personal. Pynchon does this stuff well, better, obviously, than I could myself. So I was hooked from the first page, whether the book was of great import to the nation or not.
Against the Day opens with a terrific vision of The Chums of Chance (our Edisonade characters) flying a great, ship-length flying machine of the Frank Reade variety into the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, passing the Stockyards on their way:
From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western Plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in the straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing floor.
This is comic-book gravity, fun to read. The Exposition itself is portrayed as a great cesspool of every vice and ingenuity known to man, where the Chums are propositioned by exotic prostitutes. They decline, but find it great fun to take a policeman into the air to spy on anarchists from above, and act no less immoral than the other.
I won't pretend to put in an especially close reading, so I'll just point to the high notes: I love the name Scarsdale Vibe, which belongs to a character so sinister he stops just short of twirling his moustaches. The wonderful argument among a group of "aetherists" gathered in Cleveland when they come to discover that the existence of the Aether has been disproved. "We've all had a lot of faith invested. Now it looks like the Aether, whether it's moving or standing still, just doesn't exist. What do we do now?" The great Lovecraftian turn narrated by Scarsdale's right hand, Fleetwood Vibe, in which some sort of statuette is spirited away by a group of scientists and capitalists--"not a dreamer in the lot of us, to be honest, much less any dreamer of nightmares"--from an imposing Arctic island. "All the while the thing regarded us with what, later, when we had begun to appreciate the range of its emotions, we might too easily have recognized as contempt."
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:40 PM, ,
Against the Day (and past midnight...)
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
We kept the store open past midnight on Monday to sell the new Thomas Pynchon book, Against the Day. It was a cute idea, one for which, from a retail standpoint, I wasn't very hopeful. I supposed that people who liked Pynchon were smart enough to know that the book was not going to inspire a Harry-Potteresque midnight rush, and that the book would be very much available at breakfast and for six years thereafter on reminder, just like Pynchon's last book.
So I was surprised to find a small, intellectual-looking crowd milling around at 11:55, checking their watches. It was an odd crowd, mostly men, all displaying irregular haircuts--I'm not talking about the rakish, rock-star kind, but rather the kind that are performed in mirrors by bachelors or emphasized by peripatetic combovers. The atmosphere was jovial. A very young journalist was there, interviewing people. A man I'll call Fred--a fungally middle-aged, elvin professional and regular to the bookstore, who at noon looks as if he'd just rolled out of bed, and at midnight looks as if he'd actually stayed in it--followed the young journalist around, chatting. At one point he pulled from his trenchcoat a warped, soiled peice of paper he had been carrying around for weeks. It was a poem in rhymed couplets celebrating the release of the book and excoriating James Woods and Machiko Kakutani in advance for the bad reviews they were likely to bestow upon Pynchon (he was right, as it turned out). When he wasn't following the young journalist around, he was following me around, sort of chatting unconsciously and a bit giddily in expectation of a circus atmosphere to meet the sale of the book. The stray white hairs of his combover pointed in every direction, as at a cossroads. I believe he was expecting nudity. We were joined at one point by a travel writer for the New York Times, a pleasant, intelligent and quite patient Pynchon fan on whom I foisted Fred for a while, at just about the time Fred started fumbling through his pocket for the umpteenth performance of his poem.
There is a red-eyed fetishistic thing-love that science fiction geeks, grad students, gamers and conspiracy theorists don't admit they all share until they're standing in a bookstore waiting for the new Pynchon to go on sale. Together they made the night a success, and bought enough Pynchon to pay a week and a half of my salary, which is not as many books as it sounds, but is still respectable. I joined them at the end of the night a bought a copy, a little red-eyed myself. I mean, come on, it opens with a team of teenaged balloonists travelling to the 1893 Columbian Exposition. You don't have to be a geek to love that, right?
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:11 PM, ,
"No man..."
Monday, November 13, 2006
"No man, however tough he appears to his friends, can help portraying himself in his autobiography as a sensitive plant." Auden, "Hic et Ille"
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:42 PM, ,
Borat
Friday, November 10, 2006
I actually heard someone say they found Borat offensive because of its portrayal of Kazakhstanis. Let's get this straight. Borat is a British movie poised between two completely fictionalized third-world countries: Kazakhstan and the United States. Whereas another fictional third-world country, Mordor, has a religion and an economy exclusively devoted to molten lava, the two countries portrayed in the Borat movie are democracies whose religion and economy are devoted to unusual amounts of sodomy. Being a democracy in alignment with one or both (or all three) of these countries, Britain is suitably worried. Hence Borat, a really hilarious movie.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:19 PM, ,
A Map of Sunnydale
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
A map of the fictional town of Sunnydale, California would incorporate a few facades: clothing and jewelry shops, a few TCBY outlets, a magic shop, stretched in a thin semicircle defined by a Main Street that leads, on one end, to a mall, and on the other end, to Sunnydale High School. Behind this ring is a massive, twisted labyrinth of back alleys full of smoking manholes, unattended trashfires and empty barrels. This area is as endless as the mind and a few reconfigured props can make it, and if you were to run down any given back alley from the retail facade, you could make an endless number of right turns and always find yourself turning into in a new dark alley, like a fractal pattern made from incidental architecture. Businesses thrive in this sunless area of town--The Bronze, a popular nightclub for teenagers, can be found there. On the other side of the retail facade, across Main street, are suburban, Upper-middle-class homes with sizeable backyards. These backyards converge at a monolithic wall, made of ancient rock and crusted with black mold. Behind this wall is a vast necropolis housed with every type of walk-in crypt, mausoleum and gravestone, from every era, stretching as far as the eye can see. Somewhere nearby is the ocean, and a few docks. A highway leads toward the college, and then out of town.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:40 PM, ,
Prix Goncourt
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
The latest winner of the Prix Goncourt, an American named Jonathan Littell who has lived in France since the seventies, somehow found the time to skip over to America to attend Yale--then had the audacity to further legitimate himself by skipping through Bosnia, Afghanistan and Chechnya to work for something called Action Against Hunger. I speak for the illegitimate when I say: what bullshit.
Why am I suddenly so angry? Let me indulge myself. This is not a mere burst of jealousy. Naturally I'm jealous. I, too, would like to be taken out of the world of mere contingencies, to have my life of service to others mean something other than whatever was necessary, to have my work transformed into a well-publicized and slightly condescending choice rather than a penance I perform for the right to pay my rent. I'd like to have my sodden biography replaced by one full of such humanitarian asses milk and literary diamonds. But my nature is, unfortunately, linked to that of people who suffer only the slow erosion of the cream of democratic values. That is to say, I once shopped; now I help others shop; I may yet shop again: all for the good of the economy. Once a year, and only after a great hassle, I can go camping up to Taconic State Park, as I did this weekend, and stare mindlessly for hours into the coals of a fire I made and hope it's enough to, as the analogy has it, reset my system.
Literature, like hands-on, spoon-the-gruel-into-their-mouths, adopt-a-baby humanitarianism, is a type of currency only those who have paid their way out of ordinary contingencies can spend. It depends on a democracy so corrupt, so bored with the compromises of peaceful co-existence, it requires a few blasted limbs and bloated stomachs to see the politics. And returning from the Sudan, or Darfur, or the distant, bloody past of wartime Berlin, or whatever, our hero finishes himself by writing a novel. The question is, was the novel always this worthless? Was it ever needed? Or is this just a since-the-nineteenth-century thing?
The latest Lair of the Minotaur CD is more like the fire I built this weekend: it is cathartic. Listening to it helps me get back into the daily fight, which is more than Jonathan Littell, bless him, ever did for anyone who has to hold down a job.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:06 AM, ,
Watching Season 5 of Buffy...
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Watching Season 5 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is strange, not just because I've devoted such a frightening amount of my supposedly precious time to it (which, strange, yes, but in a different way) but because the the season's original airdates lead up to the cataclysm of September 11, 2001, like a trail of gingerbread leading to a great vat of toxic waste. The incredible, dark Season 6 began only one month after the event (about which, more later). If your talking strictly in terms of the time it was aired, then Season 5 is the penultimate expression of pre-9/11 thinking. Death dominates the season along with an oppressive alienation from life. I'm not sentimental enough to say that there were televised signs and portents leading up to that date, embedded in the story arc like whorls on clerical robes. There weren't. But the season luxuriates in death in a way I don't think could happen now.
The season begins with Dawn, Buffy's previously unmentioned little sister, suddenly appearing without warning and without any recognition by the regular characters that she had not been acknowledged before. Life in the fifth season continues with her tagging along as if it were normal. Such logic-busting plot developments are common in television, of course. Yet while in a movie or a contemporary novel such an unearned development would be deeply dissatisfying, in a long serial narrative sudden intrusions such as Dawn's become as forgivable as they would be in life. As with David Copperfield's few completely arbitrary run-ins with Mr. Macawaber during the course of his narrative, we don't ask how such a fortuitous meeting came to be, but only how it will affect the character we've come to empathize with completely.
So it's fantastic--spoiler follows--that somewhere near the fifth episode Dawn is exposed as the embodiment of a weird plot contrivance by a gaggle of tonsured (Franciscan? why?) monks who conjure Dawn, and all the memories anyone ever had relating to Dawn, out of a mystical ball of energy which could potentially open up the gates of hell, and which would presumably be safe under Buffy's protection. As Buffy and her mother slowly piece together the strange fact of Dawn's existence (deciding after long deliberation that, yes, they'll keep her), the audience has to re-think exactly how far they will allow a television plot to stray from any semblance of narrative unity. It's like a slap on the hand, gentle but powerfully interrogative. When Dawn, who is the last to be let in on the contingencies of her own existence, finally learns the truth, she falls into despair. "What am I?" Dawn asks, after having cut herself. "Am I real? Am I anything?"
It may be a little too big-time geeky to suggest that this scene is an interrogation by the repressed element of what we want in fiction (diagetic fantasy--up to and including a wish for a little sister suddenly fulfilled--along with convenient non-diagetic elements such as nimble editing and an attractive cast), directed at whatever in fiction is dominant because it's supposed to make us quality people (a unified narrative and a mimetic fidelity to reality). Instead I'll simply say that it's a great representation of how it feels to be at the nadir of adolescence. It also culminates in a tremendous bad-vibe feeling towards life, an existentialism not supported by texts but presented as it really feels by ordinary people, usually adolescents. A great, crushing sense of the weird, come all of a sudden. This revelation dominates the first half of season 5.
The second half of the season is dominated by death. Soon after Dawn's revelation to herself, Buffy's mom dies suddenly by, of all things, a brain aneurysm (I will mention here that I am far more frightened of brain aneurysms than I am of vampires or anything--sex, adulthood, the Other--they might appear to represent). Then, at the end of the season and quite surprisingly, so does Buffy.
The mother's death is presented with all the tricks and stops naturalism can muster: there is not even a score, and all the background noise is oppressively part of the world the characters inhabit. When the pronouncement of the death is made official, not only does Buffy fall to the floor and vomit, but the camera follows her as she walks to the kitchen, pulls off a length of paper towel, and returns to the scene to wipe it off the carpet; which scene is to naturalism as the car chase scene in Bullitt is to its opposite. There are notably only two moments of fantasy in the entire hour. The first comes at the beginning of the episode, when Buffy calls 911. The operator leads her through basic CPR, which Buffy clumsily performs over her mother. In doing chest compressions, however, she accidentally, and with only a moderate motion, breaks her mother's sternum. The moment goes by without mention, underscoring the finality of her mother's condition, as well as Buffy's inability to do anything about it, in spite of her fantastic strength.
The second moment of fantasy in this otherwise naturalistic episode comes when Dawn is attacked by a vampire in the morgue locker where her mother is being stored. On paper it seems--if you're attuned to Buffy-logic--frightening and powerful. On screen it looks as goofy as those not attuned to Buffy logic might think it would. Rhonda Wilcox makes an noble effort to defend the inclusion of the vampire, discussing images of threshholds that play throughout the episode and how Buffy finally, in the end, "breaks through" the threshhold into the morgue in order to keep her family together. Again, this makes sense on paper.
Finally, Buffy dies, which is not something that is significant of itself until she is resurrected. About which, as I've said, more later. Gotta love the inscription on her tombstone, though: "She saved the world a lot."
posted by Greg Purcell @ 3:12 PM, ,
